Teradata plunges 17% on Q3 warning: Is it economics, or Hadoop?

I think this is more about Hadoop and other emerging technologies than the analysts quoted here are willing to admit. Why do you think Teradata is pushing its Hadoop story so much lately? There is, for example, crazy excitement around big data and Hadoop in China. Customers with blank slates center their efforts around Hadoop, while big existing customers are trying to offload more to Hadoop. Teradata sales are fairly flat right now even in the U.S. because big existing customers are getting bigger but fewer are signing up.

Your thoughts are wide of the mark. Working at the coal face I can tell you that Hadoop is helping Teradata platforms expand. Hadoop in the last 2 years has gathered huge, volumes of data that it just can’t process as rapidly and as efficiently as Teradata (and other platforms like it), so it is increasingly used to feed the Teradata system with data and the insights that Hadoop is good at delivering. Look at ebay, it runs 50-60 petabytes on Teradata and less than 20 on Hadoop. If it was all possible on Hadoop then ebay is exactly the type of customer that would have made the transition. This is not a unique pattern and your thoughts are typical of the Emporers New Hadoopla that ignores the real impact that Hadoop is having in the data integration/ETL world.

The current sticking point on growth is more about the lack of sales expansion in Teradata that was needed to keep up the momentum in sales delivery seen over the last 2/3 years. Last year was a bumper year for the company and it has failed to expand it’s sales force ahead of the inevitable bust that follows such a boom.